voluminous voices six compositions

8/16/2019 Voluminous Voices Six Compositions

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Introduction

For my Master’s Degree in music composition, I wrote six composi-

tions. In this thesis, various aspects of my compositions are documented.

I applied traditional and contemporary compositional techniques to cre-

ate six new compositions. Each of the six compositions explores a dif-

ferent way of generating musical structure and coherence.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the six pieces. Here I discuss the

ideas which led to the creation of the pieces. I also introduce “clarity of

concept” and examine how all six pieces are inter-related.

Chapter 2 looks at the major impact of North Indian musical influences

on my compositional process. I discuss a number of important concepts

and techniques of Indian classical music, especially techniques bor-

rowed from the traditions of improvisational performance.

Chapter 3 comprehensively examines my compositional, as well as pre-

compositional methods. I give a compositional “history” of each piece. I

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also discuss the evolution of my own compositional methods, especially

in reference to the role that “clarity of concept” has had on my music.

Chapter 4 explores how I have attempted to imbed content into my

music. Music, like poetry, dance and other art-forms, can be used to

express or convey ideas to the audience. Here I examine how my music

expresses content. I reflect on what I have learned at Wesleyan

University, how I have grown musically, and my musical prospects for

the future. I also briefly discuss what someone else may perceive in my

music. I discuss various concepts of my influences, where they have

taken me, and the direction they are taking me now.

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Chapter 1

Clarity of Concept: NewWays of StructuringMusic

What unifies my six compositions? I (as the composer) am one unifying

factor. Another unifying force is Indian musical thought. The most

important unifying concept is that in all six pieces, I explore new ways

of giving structure to my music. Below I go through each of the pieces

and describe the idea behind each work (“clarity of concept”).

The composition, Oh my Friend in Word, is a choral piece. My original

intention was to compose a choral work with a Bahá’í text, devotional in

nature. The main conceptual feature is an intermittent traveling from one

style of music to another. In a few measures, one type of choral writing

(perhaps evocative of some specific musical style) flows into another.

Different “genres” of music influenced different sections of the piece.

Instead of arranging these sections according to melody or rhythm, I

arrange them by genre. I already had the text, so the starting point was

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the “structure” of the Hidden Word. The Hidden Words, by Bahá’u’lláh-

the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, are considered by Bahá’ís to be sacred.

26. O MY FRIEND IN WORD!

Ponder awhile. Hast thou ever heard that friendand foe should abide in one heart? Cast out thenthe stranger, that the Friend may enter His home.(Bahá’u’lláh, 31:1862).

Because it is usually important that the text constrains the rhythmic and

melodic phrasing, the text doesn’t leave much room to free-write. When

I had first finished the music, I didn’t like the form. It didn’t flow

together well. I was about to rewrite most of the music, except the first

and last ten measures, and to devise a way to connect the two sections in

a coherent manner. Then, fortunately, my advisor Professor Alvin Lucier

suggested that I take out any music I disliked. I then re-arranged the left-

over sections so that they would flow together more smoothly. I alsorepeated some sections to give continuity. I thus create structure in this

piece through the act of re-arranging and repeating seemingly unrelated

sections. (See Chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion.)

To Jerusalem with Love: Themes and Variations is a tape piece of

sounds I collected in Isräel. The concept was to create a theme and vari-

ation form. The theme consists of the unaltered sounds that are placed

together in a collage (using ways to multi-track sounds together aestheti-

cally). In the variation of the theme, I used digital audio software pro-

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grams to manipulate the original sound files. I processed the original

sounds in two specific ways: (i) I manipulated the sound so that it was

still similar to the original, and (ii) I manipulated the sound so that onecould no longer tell from where a processed sound originated. This leads

to a quality of “hide and seek.” In this work, I create structure in a tra-

ditional way, but instead of pitched material, I use sound-bite material

(i.e., I do it with soundscape instead of notes).

The concept behind Monstera Deliciosa was to create structure within

free improvisation. The players have a great deal of freedom, but I give

them some constraints. In my first realization of the work, I had fewer

constraints than in the current version. After listening to a performance,

I decided that it was missing something. It seemed the players were not

being challenged to extend their musical boundaries. I added one ele-

ment: visual shapes for the players to interpret. The extra constraint

seemed to create an added level of structure, and paradoxically also

freed the players from themselves. So the concept provides a new way

to give structure within improvisation. I create structure within free-

improvisation through the interpretation of shapes.

The concept in Bahá was to find an interesting picture, dissect its com-

ponents and plot the parts on a graph, with time on the horizontal axis,

and pitch on the vertical. I call this a “line abstraction.” This creates a

graphic notation from which the performers interpret the music, and

therefore, the picture. The concept is similar to shape interpretation. It is

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also directly related to John Cage’s Ryoanji (Cage, 1983:2). I chose

voice and flute to create a “mysterious” quality of sound. I also wanted

improvisational qualities: the performers have to decide where to followthe line. Each must know where the middle of their vocal/instrumental

range falls in order to execute properly all the ranges in the graphic

notation. The purpose is not to match and harmonize. The notes aren’t

set, rather they are relative to the middle range, so a performer must

improvise placing each note in a performance. Moreover, the performers

take the material at their own rate. This creates a different performance

each time. The line abstraction of the picture creates the structure of the

music in this piece.

In Bombay, I translated the Braille alphabet into music notation. I had a

goal: I want a person is fluent in Braille, and knows my algorithm for

translating Braille into music, to be able to “hear” a text which has been

translated into Braille, and then into my musical algorithm. For Bombay,

I wrote poetry which I translated into the Braille alphabet (for more

information on the Braille alphabet, see Appendix B) and then adapted

to music. I chose percussion instruments because I felt that percussion

well represented the “dot” of the Braille alphabet and its percussive feel-

ing. Thus, structure here arises from the Braille translation of a poem.

The title, Fracticalis, refers to John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis. There are

no similarities to the work, but I feel I do much of my composition work

in the spirit of John Cage. My decision to compose Fracticalis began

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when I heard and became enthralled with Alvin Lucier’s work Queen of

the South. In the latter piece, the performers are amplified. The ampli-

fied signal is routed to a mixer which is then routed to two loudspeak-ers. Each of the loudspeakers is placed under a frame with canvas

stretched over it. On the surface is placed a granular substance which

Lucier calls “strewn material.” When the loudspeakers output a signal to

the canvas surface, the signal causes the strewn material to vibrate and

move. Eventually, the substance jumps around and gathers together into

a shape because of the sound. This shape interested me. Was there a way

to do something similar and be able to control and change the shape? I

asked myself. I spent some time wondering about the possibility of con-

trolling that shape, changing it and creating different designs (i.e., a

visual concept). I thought of different ways to do this, e.g., somehow

inputting sound into a complex computer program, having the sound

affect a visual aspect of some kind. Coincidentally, my husband attended

a physics conference where Dr. Bernard Sapoval did research on a con-

cept similar to that of Lucier’s Queen of the South (Sapoval:1990).

Instead of canvas stretched over a rectangular frame, it was cellophane

stretched over a fractal frame. Without going into details, a fractal is an

object with “self-similarity," i.e., a part looks like the whole. Dr. Sapoval

found that the fractal shape exhibits interesting properties that neither a

circle nor rectangle exhibit. When sound drives a circular shape, the

material will form concentric circles and bounce around within that con-

straint. In the rectangle, the material creates one type of shape and

approximately stays in that shape. What the physicist found was that if a

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granular substance is placed on a membrane stretched over the space

with a fractal frame, with a speaker was placed underneath that surface,

then the granular substance did not form into one stationary shape (likeon the rectangular shape), but moved in and out within the fractal

boundary, according to the frequency. The vibrations on the cellophane

cause the granular substance to become “spatially localized” according

to pitch. The lower a pitch, the more the material gathers in the middle

(see figure 1).

As the pitch moves higher, the material starts to move away from the

center, creating a new shape (related to whichever fractal shape is cho-

sen) (see Figure 2). As the pitch goes even higher, the substance moves

still further from the middle and closer and closer to the edges (see fig-

ure 3). The process created varying dance-like patterns. I knew I had to

create a fractal drum and compose music for it. I had a very simple

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Figure 1. Fractal drum with low

frequency exciting the granular

substance on the membrane.


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concept: I discovered by experimentation that a rich and complex sound

source (from a synthesizer), with a wide dynamic range was optimal for

exciting the membrane and creating the various patterns the fractal drum

produces. The synthesized sound had to have 3 qualities: (i) The ability

to cause the sound to get louder and softer over time using the continu-

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Figure 2. Fractal drum with

middle range frequency exciting

the granular substance on the

membrane.

Figure 3. Fractal drum with

higher frequency exciting the

granular substance on the mem-

brane.


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ous MIDI controller called “volume;” (ii) The ability to cause the sound

to get brighter and darker by changing the frequency cutoff rate, also

over time; and (iii) To be able to do pitch bending on the sound to alarge extent such as an octave or even two. “Pitch bend” is the continu-

ous MIDI controller to use for this effect. The idea is that the physical

property of the fractal drum “composes” the music: it controls what the

player will do. There are pitch, timbre and volume choices that the play-

er will choose by looking at the material and interacting with it accord-

ing to some simple rules. It’s a new way of improvising. The physical

properties of the fractal drum can thus automatically and naturally gen-

erate musical structure.

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Chapter 2

Influences of North andSouth Indian ClassicalMusic

Other than my six compositions, I also chose to perform traditional

Khyal (a style of classical North Indian vocal music) at my graduate the-

sis recital. I did this to highlight the influence that studying the music

has had on my performance, improvisation and composition skills.

Indian music has influenced so much of my musical compositional prac-

tices that I thought it would be appropriate to present the source in the

traditional setting.

How has North Indian Classical music influenced me? There are many

techniques for creating improvisational lines within Hindustani music

that may be used in music composition. Five such examples are

described below: merukhand, accenting, raga, tala and ornamentation.

The process called merukhand, defined by Warren Senders as follows:

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A system originally discussed in the “Sangeet Ratnakara”of Sharangadeva - a mathematical ordering of all possiblecombinations in a given pitch set; 2!, 3!, 4!, 5!, 6! and 7!

respectively. (Senders, 1997:1)

A system of deriving all the permutations of a given set of notes. For example, the notes [in Indian sargam notation]SRGM can be played in the following combinations:SRGM, SRMG, RSGM, RSMG | GMSR, GMRS, MGSR,MGRS | SGRM, SGMR, GSRM, GSMR | RMSG, RMGS,MRSG, MRGS | SMRG, SMGR, MSRG, MSGR | RGSM,RGMS, GRSM, GRMS, a total of twenty-four groups. A setof five notes gives us 120 combinations! Not all of thesemay be admissible in a given rage, but with variations in

phrasing and note length even a few combinations can bemade into many minutes of music. (Senders:1992)

I use a type of merukhand in Oh My Friend in Word . Rather than using a

sequence of notes, I use a sequence of rhythmic patterns. I go through

the process of merukhand with a pattern of 3 quarter notes, in a time sig-

nature of 3/4 (pattern 1) (see Figure 4), a pattern of three eighth notes in

3/8 (pattern 2) (see Figure 5), and a pattern of an eighth note triplet and

an eighth note rest, also in 3/8 (pattern 3) (see Figure 6).

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Figure 4, Pattern 1 of the merukhand

Figure 5. Pattern 2 of the merukhand


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The process gives the folloing result:

123, 132, 213, 231, 312, 321. I chose to disrupt this process near the end

of the merukhand to give variety.

Many times in North Indian music, performers will use accenting to cre-

ate two lines at the same time in a monophonic phrase. For example,using sargam notation, take the following line: SRGMPDNSNDPM-

GRS. Another line may be created at the same time, using the same

sequence of notes: SRGMPDNSNDPMGRS. There is a second line,

RMPDSDMR, which happens at the same time. This is especially effec-

tive if the line moves quickly. In Monstera Deliciosa, the computer

sequence uses this accenting concept. In one section, I use the following

sequence of notes: CC#D#F#G. It is repeated over and over again. After

a few repetitions, I begin accenting every fourth note, starting with “C”

(see Figure 7).

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Figure 6. Pattern 3 of the merukhand

Figure 7. Accenting structure


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I further develop this line to accent the ascending notes of the line, and

back again, accenting the notes of the descending line (see Figure 8).

The concept of raga has also influenced me greatly. The definition of

raga is elusive. It has been defined and re-defined many times through-

out the ages. The definition from the Ali Akbar College of Music is as

follows:

Raga: literally “that which colors the mind;” the melodicform associated with definite time of day or season, onwhich classical [sic] player improvises his performance;there are tens of thousands of ragas in Indian music.(Cheyney, 1992:34)

Warren Senders has another way of defining raga:

A raga is a collection of notes. Some notes are more impor-

tant than others; some may have special rules for their treat-

ment (e.g. “the flatted third is to be used only in descent,

and played with a slow, undulating vibrato”). The raga may

be expressed in scalar form, but in essence it is a flexible

set of rules for melodic improvisation. (Senders, 1992)

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Figure 8. Development


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In Monstera Deliciosa, the concept of raga influenced my choice of

notes for the players to use. My choice of notes didn’t come from anysingle raga, but is related to numerous ragas (e.g., bhairav, yaman, etc.).

I also did not require the musicians to follow any chalan (literally mean-

ing movement, the chalan may be described as the unfolding of a raga’s

structure and syntax), but rather to let the shapes create a chalan for

them.

Musicians like myself, trained in the Western European classical tradi-

tion are taught the concept of time signatures, with a certain number of

beats in a measure, i.e., four quarter-notes (4/4), three eighth-notes (3/8),

etc. In India, these time cycles are called tala, but they conceptualize it

very differently. Again I cite Ali Akbar College of Music:

Tala: fixed rhythmic cycles with regular pattern of beatsand accents; there are hundreds of talas.(Cheyney, 1992:34)

I have not yet used this area of Indian music in my composition, howev-

er, it has inspired me, and is a rich area for exploration.

Ornamentation is also performed differently in Hindustani (and

Karnatak) music than in the Western European classical tradition. One

technique of ornamentation I utilize from both traditions, north and

south Indian, is gamak or gamaka. Gamak is similar to a very exaggerat-

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ed and controlled vibrato. Bahá utilizes this concept, although no raga is

used as a guide.

As I learned traditional Hindustani music, it occurred to me that it was

possible to apply this knowledge to music composition. When a student

of Indian music studies for years, he or she is learning a warehouse of

techniques for creating improvisation during performance. Effectively,

the student is composing during the performance. Indian musicians pre-

pare all the elements ahead of time (as a “composer” does), but rather

than write it down for a performer, they put the elements together in per-

formance. Part of the practice regimen before the performance is to

practice putting the elements together, as an orator will rehearse before

presenting a cohesive speech. There are many pre-compositional

processes that go on during the preparations. Choosing a raga and a

bandish (song form) and a tala is a performance version of pre-composi-

tion. The chalan will dictate many choices a performer will make when

preparing for presentation. These elements all contribute to clarity of

concept. Learning Indian music, in turn, has been instrumental in help-

ing me achieve such clarity.

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Chapter 3

Compositional Methods

I have learned that most successful composers never just sit down to

begin writing music with no concept of what they want to do. Maybe acomposer receives divine revelation to get the concept, and maybe even

to “fill in the blanks,” but I don’t think one will begin the writing

process without a goal (without clarity of concept).

When I first began composing, however, I tried a sit-down-with-nothing-

and-wait-for-divine-revelation technique! I found it to be both

time-consuming and frustrating. I would start and stop composing and

then leave the music untouched for months or years. When I finally

returned to a particular work, I would become further frustrated because

so many things had happened in my musical life during the hiatus. I

wouldn’t connect as much to the original music.

Moreover, as I began the compositional process, I would “doodle.” This

process involves sitting at a keyboard with a sequencer or singing into a

4-track recorder. I would create a line by improvisation, even by trial

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and error. Then I would either record that or input it into the sequencer,

and would sing or play over it until I came up with another phrase or

passage. Sometimes I also tried this process with chords on a keyboardto achieve harmony. I layered these lines together until I felt I had used

all the voicings within my chosen orchestration. I would also arrive at

an orchestration by trial and error, choosing different synthesizer instru-

ments until it all sounded “good.” It was usually at this point that I

would have come up with 10-20 measures of music, and I would leave it

alone for months or years. Then I would start the process anew for a

new section and try to fit the two sections together: two pieces of a puz-

zle not quite meant for each other. This would cause one section of

music to flow into something that sounded entirely different, and that

would again flow into something altogether unrelated. It gave an effect

of wandering with no place to go. This is how I define lack of clarity of

concept.

This is how I began Oh my Friend in Word . I started the writing three

years ago, and by the time I had finished writing, I was ready to scrap

the whole thing! With Oh My Friend in Word, I started a "backwards"

approach to composing; I composed the last ten measures first. The

process of writing Oh My Friend in Word began in 1994 while I was a

lab monitor in the Music Synthesis department at Berklee College of

Music. I wrote the first ten measures while I was studying at California

Institute of the Arts (CalArts). I wrote most of the middle parts between

my times at CalArts and Wesleyan University, and finished composing

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and arranging over the two years I attended Wesleyan. I was still in my

“doodling” phase of composition when I wrote much of this work.

Fortunately, over the past three years, I have developed a way of com-

posing which makes it easier for me not only to write a piece, but also to

finish it. Sometimes a concept will come to me when I am consciously

trying to think of ideas. At other times something I am doing triggers an

idea. For example, when I first came to Wesleyan, Wesleyan ethnomusi-

cology Ph.D. student Harriotte Hurie and I were house-mates. She is

visually impaired and does much of her reading and writing via the

Braille alphabet. I became fascinated with the ingenious manner that the

alphabet transfers the Roman alphabet into symbols which are read in a

tactile fashion (For more information on the Braille alphabet, Appendix

B). One night, I was sitting around thinking of how I wanted to learn

more about the Braille alphabet. Then the idea struck me that somehow

it could be translated into music. I mentioned the idea to Harriotte and

she liked the idea, so I kept it floating around inside my head for some-

time. When I decided to write the piece, all I had to do, as described ear-

lier, was to devise a way to make notation and music from the Braille

alphabet. The music and structure laid itself out easily, and Bombay was

finished within a few weeks.

Now when I compose music, the most important part is to get the idea

which will then grow into the full musical structure. I can explain this

method of composition using an analogy. The “idea” or concept is like a

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seed, which when “watered” with the many techniques available to a

composer, can grow into a mature fruit-laden tree: the finished composi-

tion. Like the seed which grows into a tree, the idea expands naturallyinto the finished piece .

Below, I describe briefly how I composed each piece.

Oh My Friend in Word

After composing all of the sections of Oh My Friend in Word , I man-

aged to find certain characteristics which stood out. As I wrote the

music, I seldom thought harmonically, but rather melodically. This cre-

ates an interplay between texture (voices as background pastiche), and

gesture (one voice, either in the foreground, or solo). E.g., in the first ten

measures, I utilize a slow counterpoint to give the feeling that the voices

are independent of each other. It is all texture here. In measures 13-21, I

introduce one voice (alto and then soprano) in the foreground, while the

others are texture together underneath. In measure 92, I utilize a meruk-

hand , as described above. The last 10 measures are a homogeneous

blend. I mix modes with the same pitch center. In this case it is all ges-

ture. No one is in the background.

To Jerusalem With Love: Themes and Variations

In To Jerusalem with Love, I knew I wanted to create a soundscape with

digital audio, but it needed to be different from other soundscapes. It

was at this time that I really began understanding not only the impor-

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tance of clarity of concept, but also how actually to achieve such a

thing. It was my first chance to put my new understanding of clarity of

concept to action. I knew I was going to Isräel, so I decided to recordsounds I heard while I was there, with a very cheap recording device.

Once I made that decision, I immediately made the second decision to

make the theme and variation style I mentioned above.

To Jerusalem with Love is a tape-composition of sounds which I gath-

ered while visiting my family in Isräel, and also in the staircase of the

Rehearsal Hall building in the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan

University. Recorded on a lo-fi micro cassette recorder, and a portable

cassette recorder, I gathered many sounds from sources all over the

country. The collection incudes an Isräeli accordion player playing

Klezmer music in styles from around the world, my brother Kevin and I

roaming the old city at 2:00 A.M., bats that were making noises during

the walk with my brother (not the echolocation sounds, which are ultra-

sonic), my little brother Andrew (at age 6) singing a love song he wrote

to his then six year-old sweetheart, and a recording of a Wesleyan ethno-

musicology Ph.D student, Peter Hadley, and his student playing dijiridoo

in the staircase of Rehearsal Hall. Of course it may be a little strange

that this last element was not recorded in Isräel, but I use the argument

that it represents the abstractness of a foreigner recording Isräeli “aural”

happenings.

When I returned to the United States, I had the task of sorting the

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sounds, recording the sounds to DAT, and deciding which sounds to use.

The sounds that eventually ended up in the composition were self-evi-

dent. They had the variation and organization I was seeking.

One recording was done while shopping in the Old City, not far from

where my parents live. There are recordings of Arabic music (there is no

Jewish music, as I made the recording on Shabbat), market hustle and

bustle, sales transactions, vehicles, chanting Christians (following the

path of Christ on his way to crucifixion), little Palestinian boys playing,

a small boy playing a loud flute (with only two notes!), bells of the Holy

Church of Sepulcher (where Christ was crucified), and a shop owner

playing a Palestinian violin-like instrument. The other recording took

place at my parents’ former apartment in Abu-Tor, Jerusalem, where

they held a party. As my father and his wife are both musicians, they

invite many musicians to their parties. They mostly play American folk

music. That was true this particular night, with few exceptions. One

exception was a small demonstration of Bulgarian chants, and another

was when they played an Irish Jig. Besides the music, there is also

laughter and typical party noise.

As I described in Chapter 1, the piece is organized in a theme and varia-

tion style. There are four movements. The first and the third movements

use un-processed sounds, while the second and fourth use the processed

sounds.

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Once I chose the sounds described above, I began processing either

entire recordings, or elements of various sounds. I recorded the sounds

into Sound Designer and used Sound Designer, SoundHack, Lemur andDeck II to process them. Sound DesignerII is digital audio software

which digitizes sound for storage in the computer. Once the audio is

recorded, Sound Designer allows for many techniques, e.g. cutting, and

pasting, reversing, utilizing graphic and parametric equalizer functions,

etc. Many of the techniques are related to tape splicing. In Sound

DesignerII, I took the recording of the Bulgarian singing and broke it

down into each note. I used the notch filter of the parametric equalizer

to isolate certain overtones of each note, to create a new tune. I would

also sometimes edit the edited note, to make harmony out of one note,

again using the overtones inherent in the note itself. I also used Sound

Designer to remove as much noise from the sounds (processed and un-

processed) as was possible.

Tom Erbe, creator of SoundHack explains his computer program:

SoundHack is a soundfile processing program for theMacintosh. It performs many utility and esoteric sound pro-cessing functions available nowhere else. These functionsmake SoundHack invaluable to computer musicians, soundeffects designers, multimedia artists, webmasters and any-one else who enjoys working with sound.

Utility Functions:Play almost any type of soundfile (including AU,

AIFF and WAVE).Record any size soundfile from the Macintosh sound input.

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Import soundfiles from audio CDs.Convert between different types of soundfiles with

optional gain scaling and sample rateconversion.

Change values in the soundfile header (sample rate,number of channels, loop points and markerinfo).

Read and write Sound Designer II, Audio IFC, AudioIFF, BICSF (IRCAM), DSP

Designer, Microsoft WAVE (RIFF), NeXT .snd, Sun .au, TEXT and headerless (raw) soundfiles.

Sound Processing:Time stretching [without pitch shifting] or pitch

shifting [without time stretching] with thephase vocoder or varispeed.

Spatialize with the binaural filter.Cross-breed two soundfiles with soundfile

convolution, ring modulation or spectralmutation.

Perform more spectral “hacking” with the spectraldynamics processor and the spectral extractor

(Tom Erbe:1996).

In SoundHack, I used the phase vocoding, spectral mutation, and spec-

tral extraction functions. I used phase vocoding in various ways. Phase

vocoding is described earlier. I use the definition of the spectral muta-

tion function in the program Lemur (because it applies in the same man-

ner to SoundHack’s spectral mutation):

Timbre Morphing [spectral mutation in SoundHack] is theprocess of combining two or more Lemur (SoundHack)

files to create a new Lemur file with an intermediate tim-

bre. For instance, if a long loud tone with a fast and narrow

vibrato is morphed with a short quiet tone with a slow and

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wide vibrato, the morphed result should be a medium

length, medium loudness tone with an intermediate vibrato

speed and width. This process differs from simply mixing

the two tones; only a single tone, with some of the charac-teristics of each of the original tones, is audible in the mor-

phed tone. (Fitz and Haken, 1995)

Sometimes I used Sound Hack to expand or compress the time, some-

times the pitch. Sometimes I used the drawing function to change the

time expansion factor or the pitch transposition factor during processing,

the result being a change in scale over time. I used the mutation functionto transform one person’s laugh to another (in this particular case, I also

stretched the sound on the time domain). One of the sounds on which I

used spectral extraction sounded like a circus organ, so I used it to con-

vey that feeling in the beginning and end of that particular movement.

A description from the manual of Lemur is as follows:

Lemur analysis consists of a series of short-time Fourier

spectra from which significant frequency components are

selected. Similar components in successive spectra are

linked to form time-varying partials, called tracks. The

number of significant frequency components, and, thus, the

number of tracks may vary over the duration of a sound.

Synthesis is performed by a bank of oscillators, each oscil-

lator reproducing the frequency and amplitude trajectory of

a single track. Phase accuracy is maintained using cubic

phase (parabolic frequency) interpolation between spectra.

The Lemur model allows extensive modification of the

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sound using Lemur’s built-in editing functions, or using

other customized editors to modify the intermediate analy-

sis file before re-synthesis. Lemur provides tools for time

and frequency scale modifications, partial editing and prun-ing, timbre morphing, and many other manipulations in the

model domain. Time-variant manipulations may be per-

formed at synthesis time using control files. The Lemur file

format contains only amplitude, frequency, and linking

information for each track, making it easy for users to write

customized Lemur file editors. Third-party implementations

of the Lemur model are available (here for example), and a

real-time controllable implementation of a bandwidth

enhanced synthesis algorithm is under development. (Fitz,et al, 1995)

I took advantage of Lemur’s spectral editing to edit many sounds. I

chose to draw a narrow-band sweep filter on one of the sounds. On

another, I took out everything but the most fundamental elements of the

sound. The effect was startling, as even with almost everything

removed, it still sounded very much like the original.

I also used DeckII, a multi-track digital audio program for the computer.

Deck is both a mixer and recorder, and has full automation features. It

utilizes many of the same features as Sound DesignerII, but with less

precision. It also has more digital signal processing tools, such as delay,

chorusing, etc.

Deck is the program I used to organize the sounds together, both

processed and un-processed. Since I had Sound DesignerII available to

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use, I did many of the fine edits necessary for the audio to flow together

without sound artifacts. I also utilized Deck’s automation features (pan-

ning and volume changes over time) and the effects processing.

Below I describe some technical difficulties in DeckII 2.5. Although at

times tedious, To Jerusalem with Love was fairly easy to set up. It was

when it got to the fine editing, using Deck II that it became difficult. I

had a final mix ready to go, when I noticed many sound artifacts. In

some places, the artifacts were a result of sounds not being put perfectly

next to each other, in others, it was actually a result of the automation

quantization, and in places that used the effects processing, there was

evidence of clipping. I learned quite a lot about this recording environ-

ment. Something I learned was that in fine editing, one should use head-

phones instead of listening from the speakers. Had I done this earlier, I

would have caught the defects sooner. It took several weeks to find a

solution to these problems. I found that some problems had very easy

solutions (although not always immediately evident), but for others, only

tedious work would refine the sounds. In Deck it is almost impossible to

play regions of sounds next to each other to meet together at the zero

crossfade point. The zero crossfade point is where a waveform reaches

zero volume. Edits should always be done at this point, if it is not, there

is an artifact of noise created when one waveform or region of sound

moves into another. One solution to avoid this is to create crossfades

between the regions. Crossfading is a function in most digital audio pro-

grams for fading from one region into the other. The name comes from

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the process of tape splicing, and creating various types of crossfades

from one section of tape to the next. A problem with this solution is that

the crossfade function actually has its own section of memory, and whenit is used up (which, in a large soundfile, doesn’t take long), that func-

tion can no longer be utilized. Another solution was to draw in automat-

ed volume, emulating the crossfade function, but this was usually less

successful. I found yet another problem with Deck’s digital signal pro-

cessing unit. It is easily over-driven, creating clipping at normal vol-

umes. The only solution I found for this was to turn the processing vol-

ume down until it stopped clipping (at the expense of the interesting

effects). Since this is a new feature to Deck 2.5, it seems to need more

work. The solution to the automation problem was the easiest, but took

the longest to figure out. I simply mixed the soundfiles down to the hard

disk (which creates a Sound Designer file), and the problem was no

longer there.

Mixing the soundfiles to disk creates a Sound Designer soundfile. I then

went back to Sound Designer and created one file for all four move-

ments. I placed the movements in the proper order, with the correct

amount of space between them, and recorded the result to digital audio

tape.

Monstera Deliciosa

I originally wrote Monstera Deliciosa with very little structure. It con-

sisted of almost everything in the current piece. People improvised

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freely and I had devised a system in which the players stared at each

other to start and stop playing. The end result was incoherent, unstruc-

tured and random. I wanted to come up with one additional constraintthat would add structure, but not take away the freedom of the improvi-

sation; that would add theatre, and not take away from the music.

To get that new idea, I drew from my experience working with Professor

Anthony Braxton. I had performed in an opera he wrote called Trillium

R: Shala Fears for the Poor. One of the elements in that opera involved

three shapes (squares, circles and triangles) each of which had its own

significance. In Braxton’s thinking of shapes, the square represents sta-

ble logics (composition), the circle represents mutable logics (improvi-

sation), and the triangle represents correspondence, synthesis, ritual cer-

emony, etc. (interaction) (personal communication, 1997). The singers

wore extensions on their costumes. On the extensions were the three

shapes. The singers were instructed to “interact” with these shape exten-

sions throughout the performance. This gave me an idea to create the

additional constraint for Monstera Deliciosa. I gave the musicians the

same constraints which already existed in the previous incarnation, but

also asked them to look at and play shapes which I had created (see

Figure 9). It generated many new ideas, and forced them to come up

Figure 9. Shapes for Monstera Deliciosa.


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with new approaches to free improvisation (which is rarely, if ever, truly

free). In most cases is rarely free of structure. Not only is there structure,

but the player who is interested in free improvisation will likely practicemany hours to create a storage of ideas from which to draw in perfor-

mance. The same musicians played the work very differently after the

addition of the idea of shape interpretation. They didn’t get stuck in one

idea, since each section had a different shape, and the shapes gave them

ideas to develop in a very different way.

Along with the added musicality I achieved with shape interpretation

came theatre and ritual. The theatre added a new dimension of interest

for the audience. When we used glances to control the start and stop

times, it was very subtle and difficult for the audience to notice. But it

was much easier to understand and much more interesting to wonder

who would pick up a shape next. To whom will the player give that

shape? Who will pick up the stop sign? That is an interesting shape, how

will that person it? It also has a ritualistic aspect. There is a pile of

shapes. The person always gets a pile of shapes, and, like passing a can-

dle from one to another in a candle-lighting ceremony, or placing a gold

medal around the winner’s neck in an olympic ceremony, the shape-

receiver is chosen to play the shape. The order never matters. Everyone

is equal.

Shape interpretation is one step past graphic notation. It is no longer

necessary to have any notation on paper. This piece can be expanded

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into other ways of interpretation. A suggestion from Professor Braxton

was to play a theme of real shapes, unlike my abstract shapes. For

example, a good set of shapes would be the in the theme of a forest, orthe theme of a farm. The musicians could look at the object and play

what they see. This concept also occurs in Indian music. The great

Hindustani vocalist Bade Ghulam Ali Khan would look at waves, and

sing a raga whose chalan (which I explain in Chapter 2) matched the

waves, or look at a flock of birds, and improvise in a manner that

seemed to show a flock of birds (Deodhar, 1993: 249-251). I am thank-

ful to Professor Braxton for the useful discussions we had on these sub-

jects.

Another way I drew from Indian music in Monstera Deliciosa was to

use scale forms that sounded like ragas. I used these for the acoustic sus-

taining instrument and synthesized sustaining instrument. Yet another

example of the influence of Indian music on my methods can be found

in the computer sequence. I move from one raga-like structure to anoth-

er, using little snippets. These snippets may be related to any raga with

those notes, as there are many ragas with those notes in common. The

idea I used here was accenting. Like in the example I give in chapter 2,

each group of notes is ascending. I chose to accent notes of that repeated

ascending passage to obtain at the same time, a descending passage,

moving more slowly. Sometimes I also chose to accent notes of that

repeated ascending passage so that I had, going at the same time, the

same ascending passage, also moving more slowly. At other points in

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the short sequence, I accented notes to create a melody moving through-

out the ascending passage. This comes straight from my Khyal lessons

in sargam exercises (similar to solfege exercises), meant to build impro-visational skills.

Bahá

I composed the music for Bahá by creating the line abstraction I

describe earlier (in Chapter 1, see also Chapter 4) of the Bahá’í

Ringstone symbol, using it as graphic notation (much the same way as

John Cage did in Ryoanji). I became interested in this type of notation in

a class I took with Alvin Lucier in composition, when he played the

above mentioned Cage piece. I later was able to know the piece better

by performing it at Wesleyan. The way Cage achieves a graphic notation

is by tracing over stones in a Zen garden. The singer sings these trac-

ings. Two excerpts from the directions in Cage’s score to Ryoanji struck

me:

Each two pages are a “garden” of sounds...

The score is a “still” photograph of mobile circumstances.

(Cage, 1983:2)

I love the grounding quality Ryoanji has. There is a true “Zen” sense

about it. I wanted to create something that grew out of that line of think-

ing. Thus I created Bahá.

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Bombay

In order to obtain the music for Bombay, I of course needed to translate

the poem I mention in Chapter 1. I first translated it into Braille, includ-ing all punctuation, letters, and word spacing. I then devised a way to

translate the Braille symbols to music. First I chose six instruments for

each dot. I labeled each instrument 1-6 for each dot position. I devised a

way to divide each Braille symbol and word over time. I also added

extra space after each sentence to provide more clarity, although this is

not provided by the Braille alphabet. I gave each symbol a time signa-

ture of 5/8. On the first quarter note, instruments 1-3 play when called

for in dot positions 1-3 of a particular symbol. Sometimes there will not

be any dot position 1-3 in a symbol, in which case, there is a rest for the

first quarter note. The second quarter note is reserved for instruments 4-

6 as called for in the symbol. Sometimes they are also not used and

there is a rest. The last eighth note represents the short space in a Braille

symbol before the next symbol. It goes on like this until each symbol

completes a word and the punctuation. I gave the last symbol of a word

a time signature of 3/4. The first and second quarter notes are as

described above in a 5/8 measure, but the last quarter note represents a

slightly longer space that denotes the end of a word in the Braille sys-

tem. I gave the last symbol of the last word in a sentence a time signa-

ture of 4/4, so that the pause is now 2 quarter notes long (as mentioned

above, this is to provide clarity). I then selected a seventh instrument, a

drum, to keep time. This takes the place of a conductor. I chose instru-

ments which could be easily distinguished from each other, if not by

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timbre, then by pitch. I chose instruments in the slendro scale from the

Javanese Gamelan orchestra. I had many reasons for this choice. One

reason was that I feel the amplitude envelope of the Gamelan percussioninstruments is representative of the Braille raised dot. The sharp, distinc-

tive quality of the percussion is analogous to the sharp, well defined ele-

vation of the Braille raised dot. The second reason I chose Gamelan

instruments was that I dedicated the piece to Harriotte Hurie, and she

and I were singers together in Gamelan. I used peking to represent dot 1,

saron demung for dot 2, bonang barung for dot 3, celempung for dot 4,

saron barung for dot 5, and gong for dot 6. The drum I chose was the

khendang.

Once I chose the instruments, I needed to devise a way to choose pitch-

es. I did this by representing rising and falling voice inflection with

high, medium, and low pitch ranges. When I spoke the poetry and my

inflection went higher in pitch, I chose to have the instruments go up in

pitch. If I spoke at a lower pitch, the instruments went lower. When I

came to the middle, I chose pitches in the middle. Therefore, there were

three pitch ranges, which could be applied in relation to each instrument.

For example, the saron has six pitches, so there are two pitches in each

range. The celempung has over 20 pitches, so that number is divided by

3, and the number of each third is used for high, medium and low pitch-

es. Within each range, the players can choose what pitch to play. My

choice of the slendro scale was arbitrary. Once I came up with the para-

meters, I could just “paint-by-numbers” and apply the poetry to the

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instrumentation, time signature, and pitch. The poetry:

It was a hot and cold day at the same time.

Cold, hot, who could tell?If your fingers touched the air, they would be shattered.

Like stars.

I zipped out of bed like lightening.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to wear for the journey.

They laughed at me.

So did I.

So I went back to bed.

I also created a tape to be played along with the performance. As this

piece was written with the visually impaired in mind, I wanted to add

one more level of connection. Many people use a voice synthesizer to be

able to use computers. The voice synthesizer reads what is on a screen,

or what is stored in a file. I chose to have my poetry read by synthesized

computer voices. I used the Macintosh computer’s “Speech” voices

found in “Microsoft Simpletext.” I first recorded a sentence onto DAT,

read by one voice, the left some space, and had the same sentence read

again by the voice “Whisper.” I went through this process with a differ-

ent synthesized voice assigned to each sentence, always followed by the

voice “Whisper.”

Fracticalis

I began writing Fracticalis when I took part in an instrument building

seminar with Professor Fred Stubbs as part of my class work at

Wesleyan. I entered the class with the intention of building what I call a

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fractal drum. As I described in chapter 1, my inspiration for this came

during a concert of Alvin Lucier’s music when I heard his Queen of the

South played. In creating the drum itself, I chose ahead of time a fractalknown as the Koch curve (see Figure 10.).

I chose to make the drum out of maple wood. The dimensions of the

block of maple were 10”X10”X3/8”. I decided to create the space with a

bandsaw, given what I had to work with in the workshop. I made a laser

copy of the image (10”X10”), and glued it onto the wood. I then cut the

wood in half, (see Figure 11) as that was the only way I could use the

bandsaw to cut the wood. Then I cut away the image to create the fractal

space. When I had the fractal space cut out of both pieces, I then cut

36

Figure 10: A Koch curve fractal


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each piece in half again height-wise (see Figure 12) down the middle (a

very difficult process). I did this to create two identical pieces of the

fractal placed on top of each other to contain the fractal shape, so the

granular substance didn’t fall off when the loudspeaker played into the

drum.

I glued the top pieces together from the original cut, and then the bottom

pieces. I then placed the two pieces together, clamped a membrane

between the two, and it was ready to write the music (see Figure 13).

I have written the first of many compositions for this drum and others

like it that I will create in the future. The composition is very simple.

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Figure 11. Beginning stages of constructing the fractal drum.


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From the Electronic Woodwind Instrument, a player plays single long

notes of varying complexity into the drum, and let the drum create a

pathway of notes, and expression. The filter’s cutoff frequency and vol-

ume are controlled dynamically. When the softest sound is played, it

should be a simple waveform, at its loudest, a bright more complex,

almost vocal sounding tone. This gives control over the height of the

shape. A tone with low volume and low filter cutoff-frequency will bare-

ly cause the substance to move. The pitch will change where the

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Figure 12. Last stage of fractal drum preparation.


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substance is within the fractal. The louder and brighter the sound, the

more dramatic the effect, and in this case, it is a time to exploit the

drama.

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Figure 13. The fractal drum.


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Chapter 5

Content Expression:Conclusion

Like highly metaphoric poems which have several layers of explicit, as

well as “hidden” meanings, my music expresses content on different lev-

els. In all my compositions, I attempt to convey meaning at many differ-

ent levels. I will now discuss how the music relates to the content of the

pieces.

Oh My Friend in Word has a devotional content. . This quality is present

because of the source of the text. In the beginning, I tried to create an

ethereal quality. I even ask the singers to sing mysterioso. At the end, it

moves to a joyful exclamation. It was difficult to tie content and music

together in Friend. Because I began writing it 3 years ago. It is almost

an “odd one out” in relation to the other works. It stands out because it

was written over many years and utilized compositional techniques

which (as discussed in Chapter 3) I have stopped using. But even then,

because I finished it recently, there is a very tight coupling between the

music and the content (e.g. both the text and music have the ethereal quality).

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In To Jerusalem with Love The sounds were related to the musical struc-

ture. The sound is the content . In this piece, there is no separate text ornotation; there is only the sound. Thus, there is no division of content

and form, of body and soul. One could say about the content that it is a

form of re-contextualization. The sounds are presented in their original

format and re-contextualized. I gave the original sounds a new light.

The content in Monstera Deliciosa includes the shapes and the idea of

structure and free improvisation. The inherent aspect of theatre is also

intrinsic to the working of that piece. The shapes reflect the content of

the piece.

The content in Bahá is again both devotional and ethereal. The

Ringstone symbol of the Bahá’í Faith (see figure 14) is a highly calli-

graphic symbol made from of the word Bahá. The word Bahá in Arabic

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Figure 14. The Ringstone Symbol of the Bahá’í Faith.


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means “glory” or “splendor”, but in the Bahá’í Faith, it has a more

abstract meaning. The word Bahá is the root of what Bahá’ís call “The

Greatest Name of God”. It has many forms: Bahá, Alláh’u’Abhá (a com-mon Bahá’í greeting meaning “God is Most Glorious”), Yá Bahá’ u’l

Abhá (Oh Thou Glory of Glories, an invocation to God), and

Bahá’u’lláh (Glory of God, the name of the founder of the Bahá’í Faith).

It is significant in that Bahá’ís believe there are an infinite number of

names of God, but these 4 variations have a special importance in the

Bahá’í Faith. Besides the meaning and symbology of the word “Bahá”,

the Ringstone symbol has another highly significant meaning. The sym-

bol is a metaphor of the relationship between the Kingdoms of God,

Revelation, and Creation (the three horizontal lines), through the opera-

tion of the Holy Spirit, (verticle line). The stars represent the two

prophets of the Bahá’í Faith (Bahá’u’lláh and the Báb). Therefore, the

foundation of this work is fundamentally devotional. God takes many

forms and appearances, and one of them is mystery. I attempt to emulate

this mystery in Bahá. The sounds of the flutes and voices together emu-

late an ethereal illusion. As in the first ten measures of Oh My Friend in

Word , I tried to capture an ethereal quality through both concept and

instrumentation, even maybe the lofty concept of the mystery of God,

which is inherent in the forms of the word Bahá. I was told by one lis-

tener that it sounded “ghostly” which may also be interpreted as

ethereal.

The content of Bombay is surrealistic. The content, i.e., the poetry from

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which I derived the music, is a surrealistic description of a bizarre expe-

rience I had in Bombay, India. The piece itself also has a surrealistic

quality to it. The content becomes the music because it’s translated intothe Braille alphabet and played. Here again, the content is expressed on

many levels. The poetry relays the atmosphere in a story of an experi-

ence I had during my first trip abroad. I was in Bombay, India, at my

Hindustani voice teacher’s in-law’s apartment. We had just finished din-

ner, and gone to bed. We made plans to begin the next day’s travel at

8:00 A.M. It was 10:00 P.M., and I fell asleep exhausted. After a refresh-

ing night’s sleep, I woke up with a start, thinking I had overslept. I

looked at my watch which said 11:00. But was it A.M. or P.M.? I could

not tell. I thought if I looked out the window, I would be able to tell if it

were night or day. I looked out the window, but it was still difficult to

tell. The street lights lit up the buildings just enough, that in my jet-

lagged state, I thought with certainty that it was 11:00 A.M., and that

everyone was waiting for me. I quickly got dressed, and re-packed any-

thing I had taken out of my bags. I went into the living room and found

Vijaya, my teacher’s wife. I whispered to her “is it 11:00 A.M. or P.M.?”

She looked at me like I was crazy, but laughed and said “it’s 11:00 P.M.,

go back to bed!” I laughed and went back to bed. The reference to the

hot and cold day at the same time comes from my childhood. I was nine

years old, riding in the back of a truck in New Mexico. It was winter

and about twenty degrees fahrenheit. One of my companions in the

truck was an older boy of twelve, and he said to me “it is so cold it feels

hot.” I knew exactly what he was talking about, because just the other

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day, I had put my hand under a faucet, and it was so hot, it felt cold. I

felt this line helped to relay the bizarre atmosphere of my experience in

Bombay.

In Fracticalis, there is very little explicit content because all that is done

is a wandering around, almost in a Lévy flight pattern (a special type of

random walk). Since what the player plays is dictated by the drum, the

content reflects the drum (or even exploits the drum). The content thus

reflects the exploitation of the instrument.

In all six pieces, there is a tight relationship between the content and the

music. I do not pick a melody or structure independently from the con-

tent, rather they are always tied together. Moreover, the content always

manifests itself on more than one level (and sometimes there is no sepa-

ration between content and form). This multi-level expression or mani-

festation of the content adds deeper levels of structure to the music.

My six compositions represent a composite of the musical ideas I have

absorbed over the last two to three years. There have been many impor-

tant influences that contributed to that absorption: the study of many

genres of music, the performance of many different forms of music,

from the Western European Classical Tradition to Gamelan to “experi-

mental” to jazz to North Indian music, etc. All this has helped me grow

tremendously musically, especially as a composer. There are so many

unique perspectives to be found. Many times, I find that the work I do in

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one genre of music can almost always be applied to another, both in per-

formance and composition. An example of this can be found in the

phrasing techniques in Western European opera and North Indian Khyal.I find that taking language into consideration, they are many times inter-

changeable.

Musically, these last two years have been excellent for me. I learned to

find ways to compose music that I didn’t know before or at least didn’t

think about before. I learned to have clarity of concept as a goal, and as

a starting point in my compositional process. I learned about field work

and studio work. I have learned from the mistakes (such as not using

headphones earlier in the digital audio process), and have analyzed in

my own head where I could do better. I can apply this knowledge to

future compositions, recording in the field, and even in other media such

as interactive music, acoustic instrumental and vocal, etc. I look forward

to my next project with this new knowledge in mind.

Finally we can ask: What can someone else get from my music?

Whether or not one likes the music, I feel that she or he will leave with

a “freshness” (almost a spring-like quality). There are not necessarily

ideas new and unheard of, but there is something about the choice of

orchestration and structure that seems fresh. Sometimes in springtime,

there are old things which come up new, like a flower which has spread

itself to a new spot, but is related to other flowers in the older spot. Or

like an old seed which when watered, brings forth a new tree. My pieces

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are a result of the influence of music from the past, either recent or

ancient. From this comes new appearances and expressions of old

themes. For example, Oh My Friend in Word is a choral piece, but verydifferent from older styles. This spring-like quality, in my view, is a

reflection of the new ways I create structure. The analogy of the seed

and the tree is especially thought provoking, since in each of my compo-

sition, a well defined idea (the seed) grows naturally into the full com-

position (the tree).

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Appendix A: An autobio-

graphical Sketch

I am the daughter of a musician and a visual artist, so the arts have

always been treasured in our household. My musical training began at

the age of seven, although I had shown a strong interest in music as

early as age four. When I was age seven, I learned flute in the elemen-

tary school. I was never able to take any private lessons as a child and

did not study any kind of formal classical music. I began studying voice,

again in the public school system, at the age of twelve, and taught

myself to play saxophone at age fifteen. The music that interested me

during those adolescent years was the popular rock and roll, and pop

music of that time, as well as the synthesizer groups of the seventies

(e.g. Tangerine Dream) and others. I did not know much about “high

art” music of any culture, not even my own. It was my goal, even in my

early twenties, to become famous in the pop music world. At age fifteen

I began listening to music within the pop culture that was considered

“different,” (e.g. “The Cure”, “The Smiths”, Kate Bush, etc.) and that

interest became greater as I grew older. I thank Berklee College of

Music (where I began attending at age eighteen) for introducing me to

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jazz music, which made a big impact on my musical tastes, and still

influences my musical choices in composition and performance today.

Also thanks to a former roommate, Penni Good, with whom I shared anapartment in Boston at age nineteen. Through her, I was introduced (via

Peter Gabriel) to “World Music,” i.e., music from cultures other than my

own American/British pop culture. I became more and more interested

in many different musics at that time, but still wanted to incorporate

them into my own pop/rock music. Through Berklee, I also began my

studies in the history of Western music and jazz, as well as a good

understanding of jazz theory and ear training, and traditional counter-

point and harmony. At the end of History of Music, I was introduced to

many new musics, much of which, at the time, I had a very closed mind

to and didn’t like, but I do remember one piece I loved, which was Lux

Aeterna by Ligeti. This introduction planted the seeds of my interests

today. I also studied film scoring, song-writing, orchestration, voice and

saxophone at Berklee. But it was music synthesis that kept my interest

throughout all those other studies, so I finished my degree majoring in

that. In the Music Synthesis department at Berklee, I had begun to come

out of my “fog” at Berklee (of being attached to “pop” music), as my

advisor, Dr. Richard Boulanger, introduced my classmates and me to

many new and interesting music. He was interested in and wrote musics

which I hadn’t heard before. I didn’t like much of the music at first. I

thought it sounded ugly or confusing. This lasted a short time, because

at some point, early in my studies with him, I began to understand and

then enjoy the music of Cage, Wendy Carlos (with her Balinese tuning

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systems on The Beauty in the Beast ), Varése, and many other contempo-

rary groups and composers, especially those of electronic music. In class

he gave us free reign to explore on our own, and not follow existingconventions. After age nineteen, my interest in music of other cultures

grew in intensity, and after I graduated from Berklee, I even joined a

pop band, Maniacal Choir, that blended many west African traditions

with rock. At the end of my stint with this band, I began to study North

Indian Hindustani vocal music with Warren Senders. It took me about

four years to get to this point. I would see his posters all over the place

and would tell myself almost on a daily basis, to start lessons. It wasn’t

until he gave a free workshop at Berklee that I became entranced with

the music. When I graduated from Berklee, I worked at the Music

Synthesis department, and did some private study in music composition

with Dr. Boulanger. Warren Senders moved to India with his wife Vijaya

to study with their teacher, Pandit S. G. Devasthali, for a year, and I

began studies with Mr. Senders’ first teacher, Kalpana Mazumdar in

Boston. I then decided to study with Mr. Senders’ teacher in India (dur-

ing the summer of 1994). Although Mr. Senders is Pt. Devasthali’s main

student (meaning the one to whom he plans to impart the largest amount

of musical knowledge), Pt. Devasthali has always been more than will-

ing to share as much of his knowledge with as many students as will

accept it. I studied with him 2 hours a day for most of two and a half

months. During that time, my musicianship expanded greatly, not only

in Hindustani music, but on all levels. I have kept up these studies with

Mr. Senders regularly. After I went to India, I began my studies towards

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an M.F.A.. in music composition at California Institute of the Arts

(CalArts). Here I studied composition with David Rosenboom. I began

to learn the importance of pre-composition to avoid a bad habit: writingmusic that sounds as if it is wandering. I also worked with Leo Wadado

Smith in improvisation. He helped me move my boundaries far away

from the typical straight-ahead style of playing jazz. He and I blended

jazz and Hindustani music together with a unique perspective. Since

CalArts supports the more experimental side of the arts, I began to

expand my knowledge of other artists in the experimental arts, such as

Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, Harry Partch,

Schönberg, Berg and Webern, and to look at composers of the past such

as Brahms and Debussy with other ways of analysis besides the tradi-

tional analysis that I was taught. I was also encouraged to start singing

Western Art music, and performed with the CalArts Chamber singers in

many venues, including the home of Mrs. Walt Disney. With the cham-

ber singers, I learned about Carlo Gesualdo, who has become highly

influential in my music. As much as I loved my stay at CalArts, for vari-

ous reasons I had to leave. I was accepted into Wesleyan and began

work on my M.A. in music composition. It has been at Wesleyan that I

have been able to grow, and show the fruit of the last 7 years, since my

introduction to new music. I have performed there more than at any

other point in my life, and had a wonderful supportive atmosphere for

my composition work. As the teacher assistant to Ron Kuivila, I was

introduced to the idea of “clarity of concept”, which, I figured out was

what David Rosenboom was teaching me, but in different words. With

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Alvin Lucier as my advisor, I have been able to put the theoretical

knowledge of pre-composition and clarity of concept into action. I

developed a whole new style of writing, that both took less time, and Ihave found more enjoyable in the long run (see Chapter 3 for details). I

will still do much with creating sounds, and composing, but something

so simple as creating the idea, and finding a clear and musical way to

fulfill the idea, rather than blindly going in and not being clear about

where the music is headed, has freed me to compose many more works,

works which I feel are more about who I am as a composer. Another

influence on my compositional style is the music of North and South

India (see Chapter 2 for details). At Wesleyan, I have also had the boun-

ty to perform in many different genres and venues. Especially dear to

me was the Javanese Gamelan orchestra. I learned much from the expe-

rience of learning to sing outside either “just intonation” or “equal tem-

perament.” I also highly value the beauty the music and art offer.

Performing many different experimental and new music compositions

has been rewarding, as well. Through Wesleyan University, I have made

my New York city debut in Anthony Braxton’s opera Trillium R: Shala

Fears for the Poor, under the composer conducting; am often a featured

soloist at the First Congregationalist Church of Waterbury; and have per-

formed John Cage’s Ryoanji; Robert Ashly’s It’s There; David Tudor’s

Pepsi peice; Alvin Lucier’s Music for Gamelan Instruments; Javanese

Wayang Kulit Pandawa’s Dice Game; and Robert Nasta’s Variations on

a Theme (by) E. E. Cummings and “Oh.” (Chant with Imitation).


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Appendix B

The Basic Workings of BrailleFrom the Visions Lab, Purdue, University, URL:http://www.chem.purdue.edu/facilities/sightlab/index.html

Braille is the written means by which many blind people communicate. Itwas invented in the nineteenth century by Louis Braille but has been slow to become widespread, and is almost exclusively used by the blind. Although atechnically magnificent form of information storage, Braille can be frustrat-ing to learn and is actually used by only a minority of sight-impaired people. The dots used in Braille are slightly raised off of the page that they are printed on, allowing patterns to be recognized bytouch. Braille is read left-to-right, just like English. Interestingly, atypical Braille page (which is 8*” by 11”) consists of 40 characters (orcolumns) and 25 lines (or rows), which is the same as a typical IBM DOS

screen (although Braille was most definitely invented first). Braille is oftendouble-sided to save space; that is, it is often printed on both sided of thepage (just like inkprint) and bound just like print books are bound.

In the United states, all Braille is composed of six-dot cells (except for afew unusual eight-dot codes like the Oregon State University Science AccessProject or Computer Braille Code), with the cells arranged in a 2 x 3 matrixas follows:


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This allows for (23)2 - 1 = 63 symbols total. While this sounds like a lot, con-sider that the standard for English documents is ASCII text, which has 255symbols, which is often barely adequate for practical usage. Although Brailledocuments are often longer than print documents (a typical literary Braille

document has 3-5 times more pages than an equivalent print document), theactual information density is higher. This is because Braille eliminates thenon-information containing bits, such as spaces and vowels, similar to thetechniques employed by software compression routines. In other words,there are very few symbols in Braille that retain their meaning when permut-ed, or spatially exchanged. In English, this is not the case, because vowelshave very little informational value, and many other symbols are redundant.Consider the following sentence:

Can you see the outline of the spirit?

Now, imagine removing all of the “nonessential” vowels, to get:

Cn y s th tln f th sprt?

This is reminiscent of several different types of word-puzzles (for example,the game of CNUCDC? = Can you see the sea?). With some thought, thissentence could be decoded by most people. While this form is more compactthan the original, an even better (and more easily interpreted) compactioncould be obtained by transforming this string of characters using a set of pre-set rules defined for common English words:

,c y see ! \l9e (! _s8

This string is two characters shorter, and easily understood when thefollowing replacements are known:

* , = Capital Indicator (the next letter is a capital letter)* c = can* y = you* ! = the

* \ = out* 9 = in* ( = of * _s = spirit* 8 = ?


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This is exactly what Braille does: replaces the alphabetic nature of theprint language with a morpheme-based system of coding. Thus, each symbolin Braille generally corresponds to a basic unit of meaning, rather than just a

single letter. However, native Braille code can be difficult to read by sightedpeople, since the decoding process is something best learned young, beforelanguage patterns are set. Many blind people learn to read Braille earlierthan sighted people can learn to read print, since print-reading takes a cer-tain maturity of the eye muscled for focusing and fine movement that doesnot generally develop until around age three. The sensory skills needed tofeel the raised dots of Braille, however, can be developed very early in infan-cy. This author is aware of several blind people who were reading children’s books in Braille when they were but two. Braille documents are large because the Braille “font” is a fixed-pitch 24 point non-kerned font, with an

interline spacing of 29 points (more than single-space.)

Braille comes in several varieties, as follows:

Grade I Braille is a letter-for-letter translation from print. It is easy tolearn, but is very bulky and cumbersome to read. It is comparable tospeaking sign language by spelling out each word as you say it. An example:

This is a test.

In Grade I Braille:

Its ASCII Equivalent:

,this is a test4

Grade II Braille is the standard format for the vast majority of Brailledocuments, and the format that is used for all documents produced by theVISIONS Lab. It consists of more than 200 abbreviations for common wordsand some spacing conventions that allow for the text to be compact and fast


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to read. Although some of these abbreviations appear strange in a modernsociety, most are carefully thought out. The relatively small number of abbre-viations is because of human limitations; imagine having to learn an alphabet consisting of 250 letters as a young child! Thus, Grade II Braille is more

difficult to learn than Grade I, since multi-cell abbreviations are used. Anexample:

This is a test.

In Grade II Braille:

Its ASCII Equivalent:

,? is a te/4

Grade III Braille is an advanced form of Braille code that usesabbreviations similar to stenographer’s shorthand to encode the text. Spacesand vowels are generally omitted, an there are literally hundreds of possiblecombinations of symbols to learn. This is where the true power of Braille as aform of information storage shines through. Unfortunately, Grade III Brailleis not widely used; in fact, only a few hundred people in the US can write inGrade III Braille. In this regard, Grade III Braille is like Esperanto: an ideallanguage that few have the patience to learn.


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ASCII to Braille table:


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voluminous voices six compositions

Documents